1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for automated chemical analysis of samples and might be applied to the sort of analytical chemistry sometimes used in screening or detecting characteristics of human blood tissue or other liquid or soluble media
2. Description of the Related Art
Analysis of liquids such as human blood tissue or other liquid or soluble media is commonly desirable in a variety of clinical settings. Various tests might be performed on a liquid sample to screen for different conditions or various tests might be used to accurately screen for or identify a single condition. For example, a hospital or other clinical laboratory might wish to screen a patient's blood for a plurality of conditions such as diseases so that a number of different tests might be performed on the blood. Alternately, the clinical laboratory might utilize multiple analytic techniques to establish a particular screening result with particularly high confidence. In other cases, an array of tests might be necessary to accurately diagnose a given condition. For a high volume clinical laboratory, the multiple tests that each patient might require is multiplied by the number of the many patients that might be under examination at the same time at the laboratory. Under these circumstances, it is very useful to utilize automated analytical equipment.
Automated analytical equipment, such as automated analytical chemistry workstations, can efficiently perform clinical analysis on a large number of samples, with tests being run concurrently or within short time intervals. Efficiencies result in part because of the use of automated sample identification and tracking. This equipment can automatically prepare appropriate volume samples and can automatically set the test conditions needed to perform the scheduled tests. Test conditions can be independently established and tracked for different testing protocols simultaneously in progress within a single test station, facilitating the simultaneous execution of a number of different tests based on different chemistries and requiring different reactions conditions. Automated analytical equipment is particularly well suited for high volume testing environments, such as exist in many hospitals and in centralized testing laboratories because the automatic sample handling allows for more precise sample identification and sample tracking. Automatic handling and tracking of samples significantly reduces the opportunity for human error or accidents that can lead to either of erroneous test results or undesirable contamination.
An example of such an automated clinical chemistry system is provided by U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,976 to Choperena, et al., which describes embodiments of the Access® Special Chemistry Analyzer presently available through the Clinical Chemistry Division of Beckman Coulter, Inc., located in Brea, Calif. Another automated chemistry analyzer is the SYNCHRON LX®20 General Chemistry Analyzer, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,863,506 to Farren, U.S. Pat. No. 5,833,925 to Hsu, et al., and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/748,135 to Robins, et al., entitled “Pressure Detector for Chemical Analyzers,” and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/746,649 to Fechtner, et al., “Automatic Chemistry Analyzer with Sample Cup Piercing Assembly,” which is also presently available through the Clinical Chemistry Division of Beckman Coulter, Inc., located in Brea, Calif. These chemistry systems can provided automated analysis of a number of samples.
There are instances when these integrated clinical chemistry analyzers are unable to perform all of the desired tests on a set of samples. For example, it may be desirable to perform tests on a given sample in both of the Access and SYNCHRON LX20 analyzers. It is desirable to run such tests in as automated of a way as possible.